‘Cabaret’ and ‘Hedwig’ Get Tougher Onstage

The things a girl has to endure to get ahead in show business. The humiliation, the rejection, the objectification, the manhandling and — worst of all — the being treated as if you didn’t even exist. It’s enough to make even the sunniest chorine feel burned out by the end of a working night.

If you don’t believe me, ask one of those jaded ladies from Berlin who are currently plying their trade on Broadway: Sally Bowles and her sister in showbiz suffering, Hedwig. They know the score so well they can sing it in their sleep (or on their backs, anyway). While you may think you’ve heard quite enough of what they have to say, you might want to take another listen.

That’s because Sally, the coked-up, ginned-up heroine of “Cabaret,” at Studio 54, and Hedwig, the German-born wig wearer and rock singer from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” at the Belasco Theater, have been given new lives in their respective hit shows. And while they’ve never looked wearier, they’ve also rarely seemed more fully alive.

The movie actress Sienna Miller (“Factory Girl,” “American Sniper”) has shrugged on Sally’s hard-won fur coat in “Cabaret,” while Hedwig, the transgender rock demi-semi-star of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” has been reincarnated by the man who created her back in 1998, the writer and actor John Cameron Mitchell. Each is the latest in a succession of starry names to have inhabited the parts.

But while you’re watching them, Ms. Miller and Mr. Mitchell make you believe that they have exclusive rights to their roles. They have both brought additional grit to shows set in seedy environments, a sense of souls who have lived hard, fast and self-destructively. But these are tough gals, too. You just know that they’re going to survive the next car crash, the next failure, the next runaway lover.

That this should be the case with Mr. Mitchell is hardly a surprise. After all, he originated Hedwig, the East Berlin boy who became (almost) a woman and (almost) a rock idol, in the Off Broadway show he created with the songwriter Stephen Trask. And he committed the part to eternity in the 2001 movie version he directed.

For the Broadway “Hedwig,” which opened last spring under Michael Mayer’s direction, the show was scaled up and glammed up, to become an appropriate frame for its big-name star, Neil Patrick Harris, who deservedly won a Tony. Mr. Harris brought a master crowd-pleaser’s smoothness, flamboyance and comic timing to the role, as well as an energy that left the audience feeling highly caffeinated.

Mr. Mitchell’s Hedwig appears more bruised and battered by life, and on the verge of all-out exhaustion. This is partly because, at 51, this actor is 16 years older than the first time he played Hedwig. And, oh yes, last month he injured his knee, which forced him to leave the show for some performances. (Michael C. Hall, one of Mr. Harris’s replacements, took over.)

Now he’s back, with a leg brace and a crutch (which glitters like Hedwig’s eye shadow) and a crate on which to prop his leg. The inventive uses to which Mr. Mitchell and his Tony-winning co-star, the fabulous Lena Hall (who plays Hedwig’s put-upon boyfriend, Yitzhak), put said crate make this production worth revisiting all by themselves.

But there’s a deeper sense of mortal shadows and ruefulness about this hobbling Hedwig, now transplanted to America. She’s still a sublime zinger of one-liners. But as Mr. Mitchell plays her, she seems to care a little less about what we think of her than when Mr. Harris had the role. “Take me or leave me,” she seems to say, with a Dietrich-worthy languor, her voice dropping into a gutter of bitterness.

She can be roused, too, to rage and to competitive rock-star fire power. And when Mr. Mitchell — whose appearance and song stylings often bring to mind a dilapidated David Bowie — turns on the anger, Hedwig stirs and scathes everyone around her. There’s no way this one’s staying down for the count.

Nor is Ms. Miller’s Sally Bowles, who is on view only through March 29, when this revival of the Roundabout Theater Company’s 1998 revival of “Cabaret” closes. I hate to keep telling people to go back to the cabaret, old chum, but Ms. Miller is a revelation here, the most realistic Sally since Natasha Richardson won a Tony for the part 17 years ago.

Yes, Emma Stone, Ms. Miller’s immediate predecessor in the role, was sensational, an immolating fireball of neurosis and vanity. But Ms. Miller brings something more subtle and pathetic to Sally. She looks gorgeous, but in the tense, artificial way of someone trying too hard to be attractive.

She’s more sexually predatory than most Sallys I’ve seen, and more easily deflated when the erotic charm doesn’t work. And in Ms. Miller’s body language, you can read an entire history of abuse, self-inflicted and otherwise. Watch how she reflexively cowers whenever a man raises a hand. She’s been hit before; she expects it.

There’s anger in her as well, which Ms. Miller channels most effectively in the man-stomping “Mein Herr.” And though you don’t doubt that she loves her American boyfriend (Bill Heck) as much as she is able to, she knows that men are not to be relied on.

This Sally is a pragmatist, with a calloused core. When she sings the climactic title song, shortly after having an abortion, she makes it clear that while she may be shaken, she’s going to soldier on.

I’ve seen Ms. Miller onstage before twice, as Celia in “As You Like It” (in London) and in the Roundabout’s production “After Miss Julie,” Patrick Marber’s riff on Strindberg, and both times she seemed rather ill at ease. Any anxiety she displays here is strictly Sally’s. Who’d have thought she’d find her comfort zone in Weimar Berlin on the eve of destruction?

Ms. Miller and Mr. Mitchell might want to swap war stories at some point. After catching Ms. Miller at last Saturday’s matinee of “Cabaret” (which still stars the unquenchable Alan Cumming as the happily creepy M.C.), I learned that she injured herself that very night during the performance, sustaining a black eye and a wound that required stitches. Such are the dangers of life in the theater.

Correction:

A critic’s notebook article on Saturday about John Cameron Mitchell in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and Sienna Miller in “Cabaret” misstated the period of time Mr. Mitchell missed after he injured his knee last month. One performance was canceled, then he was out of the show for a week. He was not out for “a few weeks.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hedwig and Sally: New Faces, New Ideas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe